There are professional data analysts out there who tackle “big data” with complex software, but it’s possible to do a surprising amount of analysis with Microsoft Excel. In this case, we’re using baby names from California based on the United States Social Security Baby Names Database. In this tutorial, you’ll not only learn how to manipulate big data in Excel, you’ll learn some critical thinking skills to uncover some of the flaws within databases. As you’ll see, the Social Security database, which goes back to 1880, has some weird and wonderful anomalies that we’ll discuss.

The tutorial is comprehensive and well presented, including the following topics:

For more on analysing and visualising data also see the authors blog:prooffreader.com

About the author: David Taylor is a scientist who does freelance data analysis for paying customers so that he can afford to do fun data analysis for free on his blog, prooffreader.com. (Yes, “prooffreader” is misspelled; that’s the joke!)